My friend’s husband recently died, so on a foggy February morning, I ask her over for a cup of tea. “Oh, no, please come to my house instead,” she says, “and you can still see Bach’s portrait before it goes forever to Leipzig.”

Bach’s portrait in her house?

Bach sat for only two portraits in his lifetime. One is in poor condition. The other, painted by Elias Gottlob Haussmann in 1746, is in excellent condition just a few blocks away from me in Princeton.

An elderly gentleman who introduces himself as the “house manager” lets me into my friend’s house. “Madame is still getting ready,” he says. “Make yourself at home.” Curious, I look around the crowded living room, which is a cross between a church and a library.

Half of the room is occupied by a gleaming Holtkamp organ. Under a glass plate is a handwritten musical score with the name: Johann Sebastian Bach, signed with a flourish. On a lectern is an open Gutenberg Bible.

Suddenly, I am standing face-to-face with perhaps the greatest composer who ever lived. I know the famous portrait from the jackets of the old record albums my father used while preparing music for his church, and then later on from CD covers and busts sitting on pianos around the world.

Bach was sixty-one when his portrait was done. He is a stout man with a double chin and an unhealthily ruddy skin. He wears a white blouse with sleeves puffed at the wrists; over it is a black jacket with hard buttons. On his head, like a weird hat, is a white wig. In his right hand he holds a tiny piece of sheet music. On it is written, “Canon triplex á 6 Voc.”

Then Judith enters, the widow of musicologist and philanthropist Bill Scheide, who died in November at the age of one hundred. She is momentarily distracted, shuffling around the room, but when she sees me in front of the painting, she brightens.

“Ah,” she says, “you’ve already met him.”

The house manager brings in a tray of tea, and Judith takes a sip. “Bill bought this painting sixty-two years ago,” she says. “It was his most prized possession. Our mornings always started here, in this room, with the music of Schubert. Bill said that listening to Schubert first gave him permission to listen the rest of the day to Bach.”

I had heard about the wave of emotion in church during Bill Scheide’s funeral when Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major was played. Arthur Rubinstein called this composition “the gateway to heaven” and wished to have it played at his own funeral.

“He looks very serious, huh?” Judith says, with a glance at Bach, “but he was a gentle man.” She then sits at a Bösendorfer piano which I had completely overlooked.

“Whoever makes music, makes something of love,” she says as she opens the Notebook for Anna Magdelena Bach. As we listen to Bach’s Bist du bei mir (BWV 508) playing in the background, Judith seems to turn into a girl. Bach, who watches from the wall, is suddenly no longer the pompous man with the quizzical look that Haussmann gave him but a distant third husband watching his much younger wife.

I listen to the song’s words and think of my father, who died three years ago today: “Be thou with me, and I will go gladly to my death and my rest.”

“It is time that the cantor of St. Thomas Church return to Leipzig,” Judith says, looking softly at the painting. “But how I will miss him.”

On being subjected to long stretches of tuning at some early music concerts I’m reminded of the old joke about going to a fight and having a hockey game break out. Even if the tuning doesn’t actually take longer than the musical works on the program, its repeated eruption throws things badly out of balance: before the music has even begun, the listener’s excited anticipation deflates. Between the pieces the flow of the concert is continuously diverted because of all those finicky viols with their profusion of strings, and even worse the lute in the unwieldy state to which it had evolved by the eighteenth century. One contemporary wag quipped that having such an instrument was more expensive than keeping a horse, and that if a lutenist lived to sixty years of age, forty of those had been spent tuning the beast.

In a modern symphony concert the tuning proceeds quickly and has a strictly policed ritual form that hearkens back to the militaristic origins of the orchestra as an institution. The second-in-command – the concertmaster – orders an A from the oboe and then directs the various platoons to fall in line with the pitch. The present-day orchestra has modernized musical weaponry that can be quickly calibrated: the mustering of the troops takes about a minute. This demonstration of uniform sonic discipline then quickly recedes into respectful silence for the entry of the generalissimo – the conductor – who leads his army into battle against the massed armies of one great power or another – Brahms, Beethoven, or some new contender.

Such discipline is often absent among the disorganized irregulars of many an early music battalion. Their dutiful fussings are necessary perhaps, but often dispiriting.

In the eighteenth century tuning was typically done to a prelude improvised by the organist or harpsichordist. He was charged with slowly traversing harmonies that made for useful references for the adjustments of the stringed instruments. The American musical traveler and collector Lowell Mason heard precisely this approach in the nineteenth century in Bach’s old church of St. Thomas in Leipzig. Mason reported that the result was the most out-of-tune band he’d ever heard.

Nowadays there are apps for iPhones and kindred gizmos that make off-stage tuning possible for strings and winds. But some recalcitrants cleave to their twentieth-century ways rather than go back to the eighteenth or join the twenty-first.

Imagine never having to listen to protracted tuning at a concert – neither before nor during. Such a concert would have two robust halves of music separated by an intermission that felt like it had been earned rather than just being more dead time to added to that already killed by the tuning.

And while we’re bent on focusing our concert on content, uplift, and edification, let’s dispense with the clutter of applause and move things along directly between the pieces with an enlivening script presented by a fabulous speaker/actor who brings the story of the concert to life as no set of stuffy program notes could ever do. And since we’re cleansing the stage of distraction, let’s sweep aside the scores and the music stands. Disappear the conductor, too.

Impossible, you say, to ask every one of the dozens members of an ensemble to memorize their own parts in a program that approaches two hours in duration. And to expect all these disparate minds to remain on track without traffic-cop direction given by a conductor will lead to too many collisions to count. How can all these folks remain on the same page when there is no page in the first place?

But banish these objections for a moment further and picture these unencumbered players interacting with one another musically and physically, sometimes moving about the stage in a kind of dance and assuming visually striking formations. The seated soldiers of music rise up to become ever-changing tableaux vivants.

What this revolutionary approach opens up is the possibility of a concert as theatre in which the grace and vibrancy of bodies at music become integral to the performance.

Such a vision of performed music, be it is classed as early or modern, is no mere pipedream. One of the world’s great baroque orchestras, the Toronto-based Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra has brought this ideal to eloquent and unforgettable reality with its “Galileo Project” conceived for the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, marking four hundred years since Galileo Galilei made his first astronomical observations and Johannes Kepler published the Astronomia nova.

Developed by Tafelmusik during a residency at the Banff Centre, the Galileo Project was premiered there in January of 2009. Like a heavenly body migrating through the sky, the Galileo Project crossed Lake Ontario from Toronto to Ithaca, New York five years later to light up the Saturday night firmament in Cornell University’s Bailey Hall, a century-old neo-classical pile whose cavernous interior sometimes seems as if it could accommodate a couple of solar systems within its vaults. In spite of the far-from-ideal venue for the intimacies of early music, Tafelmusik filled the place up with the energy of its music and the appeal of the story it told with the aid of movement and image. The musicians traced their own orbits and cycles on stage beneath a large circular image projected behind them whose circumference was ornamented like Galileo’s telescope. It was as if we were looking through his lens at the extraordinary things from across the universe, from here on earth to the most distant stars; from Kepler’s printed words and music about the songs of the planets, to photographs of stunning terrestrial landscapes and fabulous nebulae and comets that we now can see at levels of resolution and magnification never dreamt of by Galileo himself. The well-researched and elegant script was written by the long-time Tafelmusik double bassist Allison MacKay, who has frequently collaborated on what she calls “cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary projects for the orchestra.”

Dressed all in black but with touches of color brightened by the colored hair of two of the female violinists, the players moved silently onto the stage to welcoming applause and started right in – no tuning! – with a Vivaldi concerto whose virtuosic allegro and seductive largo astonished and seduced, two things the night sky is also very good at doing. While this sensuous music of Venice introduced the Harmony of the Spheres in the context of the Galileo Project, it evokes for me the water and tenuous earth of its birthplace, Still, there is also something weightless and celestial in this eighteenth-century top-of the-charts stuff when done by Tafelmusik and its long-time director, Jeanne Lamon, recently retired but for the time-being still at her post.

From Vivaldi’s Venice we moved to France by way of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and comets and skyscapes seen through the Galilean lens to witness Phaeton’s disastrous crash of his father Apollo’s sun chariot. This suite of pieces came from Jean-Baptiste Lully’s 1683 Phaëton, the magnificent tragédie en musique about the ill-fated teenage joyrider. Tafelmusik literally moved from the overweening confidence of the pompous overture to the inexorably elegant and elegiac Chaconne in which twelve of the musicians themselves formed a circle and, like the signs of the zodiac, rotated through their choreographed yearly cycles. These motions allowed for the players to engage in seemingly spontaneous – but in fact carefully staged – dialogues of artistry and emotion in configurations at or near center stage that momentarily escaped the gravitational hold of the group.

From France we vaulted back a century to the musical world of Galileo, himself an amateur lutenist who came from a family of musicians. Galileo first demonstrated his telescope in 1609 in Venice, the same city that would later foster – and occasionally thwart – Vivaldi’s prolific genius. The transition was achieved effortlessly through the recitation of Galileo’s own writings by the narrator, actor Shaun Smyth. An Albertan born in Scotland, Smyth brought with him from the old country a mastery of dialects of the British Islands that he deployed occasionally – and only when called for – with humor, flare, and taste.

Smyth and the musicians traced the chronologically retrograde path from Vivaldi to Lully to Monteverdi Smyth by way of McKay’s insightful and well-researched script. Now with Galileo we heard the streaking comet of Monteverdi’s concerted madrigal Zefiro torna set by Tafelmusik for its two cellists, Christian Mahler and Allen Wheat, singing through their instruments like cosmic angels. Unleashed from the planets Plato imagined them sitting, they ran wild through earthly meadows and woodlands. A deft modulation lead to another treatment of same bassline by a fellow composer of Venetian stamp, Tarquinio Merula. We then retreated the shadows of a solo lute Toccata by Galileo’s younger brother, Michelangelo, the piece played with captivating melancholy and finesse by one of the orchestra’s most potent forces, lutenist/guitarist Lucas Harris. The plaintive voice of his instrument, designed to be heard in renaissance chambers, drew the hundreds-strong Bailey Hall audience into its inner feelings with a pull as strong and ineffable as gravity. It was a piece Galileo would have heard and indeed likely played himself, especially during the years of his long house arrest. These offerings were framed by pieces from the most famous work of Galileo’s time and place, Monteverdi’s Orfeo, which premiered two years before the astronomer first pointed his telescope at the sky.

After a fact-checking peek at the night sky from the plaza in front of the concert hall, I returned from intermission to my seat just as the orchestra marched back on stage for a Purcellian prelude to a re-imagining of the festival of planets organized in Dresden for the Saxon-French royal wedding of 1719: with Rameau, Handel, Telemann and Zelenka we toured Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury.

After Smyth’s hilarious rendition of an eighteenth-century English drinking song that lauds and ridicules the paradigm-shifting discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton, we heard J. S. Bach’s flights of fancy around Venus in the sinfonia to his cantata, How Brightly Shines the Morning Star (BWV 1). The chorale melody around which the other contrapuntal parts orbit resounded from one of the orchestra’s wonderful oboists placed in the hall’s distant balcony – yet another instance of the group’s creative use of the venue as a tool for mapping sound and space.

The evening closed with a rocketing rendition of another of Bach’s beloved cantata sinfonias, the opener to BWV 29. This piece had once been repurposed by Bach from a solo violin work to an organ concerto. It was again transformed by Tafelmusik into a violin concerto during which yet another of the group’s many star fiddle-players had a chance to shine, concluding a concert/performance that among its many marvels was an astounding feat of group memorization demonstrating the limitless reach of music in and as motion that, like the Keplerian cosmos, was never out of tune.

Travelers to Germany in 2014, especially to Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig, may encounter a variety of celebrations honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Peaceful Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the path toward reunification of the country. From 9 through 12 October 2014 the “Festival of Lights” will be a highlight in Leipzig, but it is the story behind the festival that must be told.

Many European cities have grand musical traditions. Leipzig is no exception for it is the city of Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach was choirmaster at the historic St. Thomas Church for twenty-seven years. Even without his considerable influence, the church would have had a rich legacy, but Bach’s reputation made it even more notable.

It was at St. Thomas Church, in 1539, that Martin Luther introduced the Reformation to Leipzig. Some two hundred fifty years later, in 1789, Mozart played the church organ there, and in centuries that followed both Felix Mendelssohn and Richard Wagner also performed at the church.

The church choir has been in existence since 1254. During Bach’s time there were fifty-four singers in the chorale. Today the world famous St. Thomas Boys Choir features the voices of eighty boys singing music particularly dedicated to Bach in weekly performances of motets and cantatas during regular Sunday services.

Bach was also choirmaster at St. Nicholas Church from 1723 to 1750. St. Nicholas is nearly a hundred years older than St. Thomas, dating to 1165, and when it was built, St. Nicholas Church was situated at the intersection of two important north-south, east-west trade routes which not only played an important role in Leipzig’s past, but it was also critical to the events that reunited Germany in 1989.

Each November during the early 1980s, young people from all over the region would gather at St. Nicholas Church for ten days of prayer for peace. There had been large demonstrations all over the German Democratic Republic protesting the arms race in those days, but the gatherings in Leipzig were regarded as little more than non-violent prayer vigils. The only places where issues could be openly discussed in Germany were at meetings held in churches, and St. Nicholas was one of those sites.

Soon a youth group from the church decided to increase the meetings by having prayer services every Monday evening. At first there were only a handful of attendees, but before long more people came to demand justice and respect for human rights. Many who participated were non-Christians, but, with no other place to gather, they regularly attended the meetings. They studied the words of the Old Testament and the Sermon on the Mount, and eventually they came to understood two things: that people should discuss urgent problems with each other and that they also needed to meditate and pray to God for support and guidance.

Slowly the movement gathered strength. Each day the church was decorated with flowers. Each night it was filled with the light of hundreds of glowing candles. After a while the government took notice and became concerned. From May of 1989 all access roads to Nicholas Church were blocked by police checkpoints.

Authorities exerted pressure to cancel the peace gatherings, but the prayers continued. Monday after Monday the meetings were held even though many were detained or arrested. Soon it became impossible for everyone to get into the church because the numbers were so great. Yet, still they came.

Early in October 1989, St. Nicholas Church was filled with more than two thousand people inside with thousands more out in the streets. When the prayers ended, the bishop gave his blessing and made an urgent appeal to the congregation for non-violence. As people departed the church, they were greeted by thousands of fellow East Germans standing in the square, standing with candles in their hands.

To carry a candle outdoors requires two hands. One holds the candle while the other prevents it from going out. In order to keep a candle burning it is not possible to carry a stick or a club or a stone.

It was a miracle. When police arrived and surrounded the crowd, they didn’t know what to do. They were bewildered and quickly lost their incentive to fight. For the protesters this was a peace vigil, and they were armed only with candles. Soon the police began mingling and talking with the people. Eventually they withdrew. As one officer said, “We were prepared for everything. Everything, that is, except candlelight.”

The non-violent peace movement lasted just a few weeks more before the government collapsed. Not long after, about two hours northeast of Leipzig, the notorious Berlin Wall went crumbling to the ground.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244b) for a single purpose – to present the Passion story in music at Good Friday vesper services, and it continues to move audiences nearly three centuries after it was first heard in St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany. Standing as one of the pillars of Western sacred music, it is at once monumental and intimate, deeply sorrowful and powerful.

The audio program presented here, hosted by Lynn Neary, is from the NPR series Milestones of the Millennium. It’s a journey through the St. Matthew Passion guided by acclaimed scholars, conductors and singers (including Ian Bostridge, Joshua Rifkin, Ton Koopman and Christoph Wolff), all closely associated with Bach’s masterwork.

With gripping drama, Bach’s Passion retells the compelling story of the events leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus. Bach divided the music into two parts. Highlights of the first part include the last supper and the betrayal and arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.

In the second part, the music turns softer and more somber – signaling the inevitability of the story – as it depicts the trial, crucifixion and burial of Jesus. The Passion ends with the darkly textured chorus “In tears of grief.” Bach could leave his parishioners in a sorrowful mood, knowing that they’d be celebrating Christ’s resurrection in just a few days.

Bach built his Passion from choruses both small and large, and arias for specific characters such as Jesus, Judas, Peter and Pontius Pilate. The Evangelist, a role for tenor voice, is the principal storyteller, moving the drama along through through a kind of half-sung, half-spoken recitative. Supporting Bach’s massive structure are three grand choruses – at the beginning, middle and end – standing as tall pillars, holding up the surrounding music.

The Passion begins with an immense wave of sound – an opening chorus constructed of an interlocking double choir with a children’s chorus soaring over the top – building with intensity and sweeping the listener into the drama.

English tenor Ian Bostridge is so taken with Bach’s music that he has made the role of the Evangelist a staple of his repertoire. “I think the St. Matthew Passion is one of the greatest pieces of music in the Western repertory,” Bostridge says. “And to start one’s journey toward understanding that piece is a very important point in anybody’s life.”

Among all of Bach’s motets, Komm, Jesu, komm! (BWV 229) is the one most closely associated with the traditions of the St. Thomas School and St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Its text is a paraphrase of John 14:6 by the Leipzig poet Paul Thymich. Bach’s predecessor as cantor, Johann Schelle, had set the entire text of Thymich’s eleven-versed hymn for the 1684 funeral of the University of Leipzig professor Jakob Thomasius, but Bach elected to set only the first and last verses for what must have been either a memorial or funeral service. Komm, Jesu, komm! can be dated to 1732 or earlier as, in that year, the oldest surviving manuscript for the motet was copied by one of Bach’s students.

Overall, the form of the motet is that of a chorale, although Bach sets the first verse phrase-by-phrase as though it were Biblical prose. In the second verse, however, Bach harmonizes the text in four parts and exploits the many possibilities afforded by a double choir. Using contrasting rhythms, meters and textures, the first section steadily mounts in intensity as the text repeatedly calls out for Jesus, and then, after strong chordal blocks, the following minuet-like melody conveys the soul’s surrender to God.

Komm, Jesu, komm! will be performed by the Boulder Bach Chorus, under the direction of Zachary Carrettin, during 21 and 23 February 2014 concerts in Denver and Boulder of the thirty-third season of the Boulder Bach Festival.

A previously unknown document, describing the work methods of Johann Sebastian Bach, has been discovered in the parish archives of Döbeln in Central Saxony. In a letter attached to an application for the position of cantor in Döbeln, one of Bach’s students, Gottfried Benjamin Fleckeisen, reports that he, while in Leipzig, “performed and conducted . . . the music in both St. Thomas Church and St. Nicholas Church . . . in place of Capellmeister Bach . . . for two whole years.” This suggests that, toward the end of his life, Bach had withdrawn from his tasks as cantor and was not producing sacred works for use in Leipzig.

The document was uncovered by Michael Maul in the final days of the research project “Systematic Investigation of the Lives of Members of Bach’s St. Thomas Boys Choir.” Due to the possible implications of this most recent finding, funding for the project, launched in 2012 on the occasion of the eight hundredth anniversary of the St. Thomas Boy Choir, has been extended for an additional year by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

I was in Leipzig, standing in St. Thomas Church, where Johann Sebastian Bach worked as cantor and director of music from 1723 to 1750. During Bach’s tenure, Leipzig started to become famous for something other than great melodies: Gose, a deep orange brew flavored with salt and coriander. This gave rise to the Gosenschenke, a type of Gose specialty bar that was once found throughout the city. Not long after World War II, however, with Leipzig on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Gose production wavered, then stopped entirely.

But then a Gosenschenke called Ohne Bedenken reopened in 1986, serving the city’s first real Gose in almost twenty years, followed by a new Gose brewpub, Bayerischer Bahnhof, which opened in a magnificent former train station just around the turn of the millennium. Another Gose, Ritterguts, is now being made just outside of town. And Gose partisans have even organized a Gose-wanderweg trail for hiking from one Gosenschenke to the next, leading from Leipzig to the town of Halle along the Pleiße, Weiße Elster and Parthe Rivers.

In the theater district just steps from the site of the great Leipzig synagogue that was destroyed on Kristallnacht, now the site of a chilling Holocaust memorial, I found Sinfonie, a dark cafe-restaurant with Ritterguts and “things to go with Gose” on the menu. I decided on a half-liter of Gose with a pairing of pan-fried zander and salmon accompanied by lemon sauce and a warm cucumber salad.

The Gose was amazing, with a mild taste of salt immediately noticeable in its thick, mousse-like head. Its body was light and slightly spicy followed by a remarkably bright finish – more crisp than the most crisp Riesling, sharper than the sharpest Chablis, and a better match for tricky citrus and vinaigrette than any wine I’d ever encountered.

The next day, at Ohne Bedenken, I tried both Ritterguts and Bayerischer Bahnhof beers with roast pork and sauerkraut, another notorious trap for wine. Both complemented the meal marvelously. In comparison, the Bahnhof had a bit more malt in the body, was lighter in color and was substantially less aggressive. The darker Ritterguts tasted much more sour, saltier and had more spicy coriander notes.

If I had to pick one, the Ritterguts would probably be the winner, simply for its brawn. But compared to Radeberger, the dishwater Pilsener from the region, both versions had character to spare. Like difficult but dear old friends, these were challenging beers, but rewarding ones.

After the death of the highly respected organist of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, in 1722, a select group of composers gathers, all aspiring to this coveted position. The composers compete in an age when patronage determines the direction of a man’s life, a key to survival, fame and fortune the products of such an esteemed position.

Introducing the characters, each act of Bach at Leipzig is prefaced by a composer penning a letter that outlines his desire to be organist, each convinced that he is the right man for the job, that his is the righteous path. The missives are then flown by carrier pigeon to the addressees. The six applicants assemble, each bringing a unique talent to the audition, but, more importantly, his political aspirations. Occupation, religion and politics are inextricable in this century, Leipzig a staunch Lutheran stronghold against the advances of Catholicism.

In order to diminish competition, various characters gather for clandestine meetings, making deals that reveal their personal ambitions. In contrast, when the entire group is together, the conversation is laced with double entendres and a facile manipulation of facts, the composers’ apparent bonhomie a façade for negotiations already set in play.

Religious persuasion is critical since the Reformation, beliefs and politics combined to defend the purity of the faith from those who would dilute God’s word in pursuit of personal expediency. In this particular gathering, competing factions proffer a variety of beliefs on predestination, Lutheran traditionalism challenged by the Calvinists‘ “standards” for achieving heaven, while Pietists “embrace an individual spirituality that frees them from all limits,” pure joy divorced from God and available to everyone.

This ingenious play reveals the farcical manipulations and skullduggery behind the scenes of the auditions as musicians resort to bribery and blackmail, religious concerns set aside, in a bid for the coveted position. Based on real persons and events, the humor is pervasive, the contestants revealing their very human flaws and willingness to negotiate in the pursuit of success.

As the play evolves, both politics and religion converge in a drawing-room farce that reaches beyond the secluded world of this appointment. Secret agendas unveiled in a rollicking exchange of broad humor, Bach at Leipzig is a subtle reminder that “politics is only war by other means,” proving once more that nothing is what it seems. The composers are faced with an age-old conundrum, “People . . . have little interest in music or religion. I don’t know what they will call this age . . . its chief characteristic is a profound lack of enlightenment.”

The website launched 21 March 2013, Bach’s birthday, with HD video of conductor Helmuth Rilling‘s complete St. Matthew lecture-concerts; poetry, artwork, photography, and scholarship; and a line-by-line animation of the libretto available in fifteen languages, set to Rilling’s 1999 recording.

Within the St. Matthew’s “Cuepoints” section the focal point is a visual representation of a 1681 bible edited and annotated by Abraham Calovius, a leading theologian of the time. Page by page, viewers can study Bach’s libretto matched against the German-language Calov bible while hearing the corresponding passage of the music. It’s a wonderful way to plunge into this magnificent music.

In addition to the animated text study, the St. Matthew Passion project includes:

This year nearly two hundred events will mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding in 1913 of the Hospital Lambaréné in Gabon, Central Africa, by Albert Schweitzer. Organ concerts, church services and meditations will take place in the churches where the Nobel Peace Prize winner had performed during his lifetime. Donations collected at the concerts will go towards the support of the Albert Schweitzer Foundation Lambaréné.

The funds required to renovate the Hospital Lambaréné are estimated to total nearly five million euros, but, to date, only ten percent of that sum has been raised by the Foundation. That organization, based in Frankfurt, is mounting this year’s Schweitzer commemoration in order to further the mission of that great humanitarian.

As a theologian and philosopher, as well as organist and musicologist, Albert Schweitzer wrote scholarly works and embraced the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. His organ teacher, Charles-Marie Widor, suggested that Schweitzer author a pamphlet on Bach so that French organists might become more familiar with Bach’s Protestant church music. That initial effort eventually led to Schweitzer’s monograph J. S. Bach (Leipzig 1908) with a foreword contributed by Widor. While many of the biographical details and performance dates of particular cantatas cited by Schweitzer have now been superseded by more recent musicological research, Schweitzer’s music aesthetic remains of great historical significance.

For Albert Schweitzer had said, “For Bach, sound never faded away, but, instead, it continually rose in ineffable praise to God. [With his music,] the Cantor of St. Thomas Church, one of the greatest mystics the world has ever witnessed, spoke to the people and led them from a noisy, conflicted world to a place of serene peace.”

An outline of Albert Schweitzer commemorative events in 2013 is available here.